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Okay, here’s the scenario. An inventory planning session for the spring season. For a chain of gardening stores in the Midwest and West Coast. Twenty managers on the conference call.

The CEO starts off with a few introductory remarks and then this sound appears in the background:

Look, I think we can all agree it’s one of the great masterpieces of grunge rock from the early 1990s. We’re rockin the Neverland. Oh, wait. We’re not supposed to be rockin’ the Neverland. We’re supposed to be discussing tulip bulb orders. Okay, someone says, who’s got Metallica on in their shop?

The call comes to a halt as everyone tries to figure out the source of the Metallica. Finally, the manager in Green Bay fesses up. He just noticed the high school kid he has loading fertilizer bags on the display rack next to his office is using Metallica to “pump me up for this job, dude.”

Okay, we’re back on track and talking about tulip bulb orders — until the conference call comes to a halt with what seems to be the sound of automatic gun fire and mixed with a yipping. The conference call stops and everyone checks in. Nope, no roving gunman. And yet it continues. Oh, wait. It’s Alison, the National Sales Manager at the office in Provo. She’s chasing her Maltese around the office in heels. She had to bring “Walter” into the office today because he has a vet appointment right after this call.

The noisy caller is a nagging problem in teleconferencing. It’s not the caller per se, but their environment from which they are calling. Look, I’m as big a fan of Metallica as any other right-thinking American, but not when it’s drowning out a group discussion during a business teleconference call. And many times the offending party has no control over the background noise: Is it Gary in Spokane’s fault that a homecoming parade for Joel E Ferris High School is going by the window at the same time as our conference call?

Probably not.

But does that mean the rest of us have to suffer?

No. Which is precisely why UberConference has a mute setting on each of your callers. Barking dogs, heels on hardwood, brass bands in parades, or an old-fashioned “Enter the Sandman” blast: all of these can be eliminated by simply muting the offending callers.

Then just message the person whom you’ve muted that there’s a problem on their end. (A polite way of saying: shut the window, take off the heels, let the parade pass, unplug the speakers, and so on). When they are ready, unmute them and return to the call. And all of it is discreetly handled.

1. Know who is on the call.UberConference allows you to see who, exactly, is on this call. These are private, important issues you’re dealing with. You need to know who is on the call, and whether they belong there.

2. Know exactly how long the call lasted.With UberConference call tracking, you have a record of how long the call actually lasted no matter which phone you used to dial into the call. Lots of firms have ways to track hours on conference calls, but those solutions are limited to your desk phone or require you to enter a useless PIN number for each call. Only UberConference does this automatically every time.

3. Lock the call.Once you’ve started an UberConference, we show you every person who has dialed into your call. With UberConference, we let you lock in (and more importantly — lock out) participants. Once you have the right people on the call, just hit the lock icon (or press ** from your phone) and nobody else can join your conversation.

As the admin of your UberConference Business account, you can now control key features across all of your team’s UberConference accounts. Once you set preferences in the admin account, the changes are applied to all accounts in your Team. UberConference Business helps you set your whole team up with painless conference calls and more productive meetings. Learn more here.

Now you can share files from your computer within an UberConference call thanks to the new Box View, even if you don’t have a Box account.

Take any PDF or Microsoft Office file from your computer, click “share file,” choose “computer” and it will appear right in your UberConference window. The files are also sent out at the end of the call in the UberConference call summaries for easy reference.

So simple.

Box View does the hard work of transforming popular office documents and other files into HTML, so they can be displayed in a browser for UberConference users to share and discuss during their meetings. The Box View API powers the fastest, most elegant content viewing experience on the web and on mobile.

The UberConference team is at the first annual BoxDev Conference in San Francisco today to support the Box platform and their Box View API announcement. We were highlighted during the Opening Box keynote by Ryan Damico, Director of Platform at Box, as “a really interesting use case that shows how you’re taking an already great service and adding even more value on top of it.”

Over 1,000 developers and entrepreneurs attend BoxDev for exciting platform product launches, deep-dive technical sessions and thought-leadership sessions on building for the enterprise.

UberConference has been featured in the business section of the Apple App Store. Our brand new iOS app gives Apple users an easier, more effective way to stay connected while on-the-go. The app offers some of the great capabilities you can find on our web browser: